MFA in Creative Writing: Low-Residency

Ranked among the top low-residency MFA creative writing programs in the country, Lesley’s MFA Program in Creative Writing nurtures and challenges your literary promise through rich mentor relationships and interdisciplinary study.

Focus Your Writing Career

Community and Individual Attention

Twice a year you’ll attend a nine-day residency,
joining an artistic community in craft seminars, workshops, readings,
receptions, meals, and publishing-related events. During each of the
four semesters between residencies, you’ll work on your creative and
critical writing one-on-one with your faculty mentor. This format allows
for the best of community inspiration and individual attention.

Accomplished Alumni

Our graduates have published many books
and individual works in prestigious journals, won major literary prizes
and fellowships, and found teaching positions in numerous schools and
colleges.

Guidance from Prize-Winning Writers

Your faculty mentors are
celebrated writers and passionate teachers. They have won scores of
honors and awards; written hundreds of books, screenplays, and stage
plays; and taught at many of the other top MFA programs around the
country. Learn more about the creative writing faculty.

A Setting That Energizes Writers

Lesley's low-residency MFA program is one of the few located at the heart of a major literary city: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whether you live in the area or travel to our residencies, you become a citizen of this literary Mecca, developing friendships and contacts with local writers and publishing professionals.

Unique Interdisciplinary Component

Lesley’s Interdisciplinary Studies component nourishes your writing and your aspirations to be a working writer when you graduate. You can choose to design an independent study, gain experience in an internship or as a teaching assistant, take courses in subjects related to your concentration, and experiment in other literary genres.

Contact Us

Award-winning author Sara Farizan (MFA ’10) writes the books she wishes she could have read as a teenager. As a graduate student in Lesley’s master of fine arts in creative writing program, Farizan hit on the idea of writing a young adult novel about two girls desperately in love, set in Tehran, Iran — a very dangerous place to be gay. Read more.

Lesley Welcomes New Writing for Young People Faculty

The MFA Program in Creative Writing is delighted to welcome Michelle Knudsen and Jason Reynolds to its Writing for Young People faculty. Michelle is a New York Times best-selling author of more than 40 books for young readers. Jason is the author of the highly acclaimed YA novels, The Boy in the Black Suit and When I Was the Greatest, winner of the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award